Our process, part 1: Concept
Okay, I’ve been meaning to start this series since something like 2014. But, as you may have noticed… Well, I didn’t do it. Quite frankly, I’d rather be writing a book that write a post about how I write one. It’s an important thing to document, though. It holds me accountable to my own process and shares it for anyone who might find the information useful.
A quick note: This is only a discussion of how Aron and I write and publish our books. If anything we talk about is useful to you, great. But no one process works for everyone. I don’t swear that if you follow these steps, you’ll walk away with a completed novel. Everyone has to write their own way, but it’s usually helpful to at least look at someone else’s process.
This is going to have a few parts, because so does our process. Part one will be the concept – obviously. You read the title of the post. The second part will be about our outlining process. Part three will be drafting the manuscript. Part four is finishing the manuscript. The fifth and final bit will be our publication process. Does that sound tedious? Yeah, it kind of is. But when I’m done with all the steps, I have a book!
Mom, where do story ideas come from?
The first part of this little series was actually going to be outlining, but when I started writing, I realized that I needed to cover the concept phase. I had intended to spend just a paragraph or two on that as a sort of zero-level outline before I got into the nitty-gritty of our outlining process. Once I got started, though, I realized that the concept is a phase all of its own. A four-part series became five.
Aron: Should have outlined the posts first!
Fine, then. Let’s talk about concepts. Even those who have never written a single book know about this part: the spark, the idea, the thing that sets a fire in your heart and under your ass to write a story.
A lot of authors get that time-honored question: “Where do you get your ideas?” I don’t think anyone’s asked me that, exactly, but let’s go ahead and talk about it.
If you know me, then you know where I get a lot of my ideas – role-playing games. At least, that used to be the case. It seems to be less and less so as the years go by. No, that’s not it… I think I just have more ideas that aren’t borne in the Cheeto-fueled crucible of a gaming session.
So why game? Well, Aron (my husband and co-author) and I are the two storytellers of our gaming group, so it might be better to say that game is our testing ground for a story concept. If it engages and inspires our players, that’s certainly an indicator that a larger audience might enjoy the idea.
Now, none of our games translates directly into a book. What makes a good gaming session is not the same stuff that makes up a good book. But we’ll take some concepts that we liked, combine them with our favorite characters from that campaign, and the see what we can do with them.
Another reason I take a lot of inspiration from game is those characters I just mentioned. Aron’s good with characters, but I’m just… not. Left to my own devices, I can create about three different people: the good guy/straight man (or woman) who acts on purely moral grounds; the snarky rogue with a heart of gold, who does pretty much the same thing, just with a few more layers of sarcastic comments; and the asshole, the bad guy who just wants to watch the whole world burn. Those three just aren’t enough to populate a whole book.
Game provides me a whole slew of other people’s characters, every one of them crafted by their player with the sort of attention, love and care that I just don’t know how to give an ensemble cast. So I steal liberally from my players to fill my books with characters that have more motivation than “I’m a good guy!”
Don’t worry, my players are all well aware that I’m cribbing like mad from their performances. They’re cool with it. But if you try this shit out, make sure it’s okay with your sources.
Aron: I’m going to jump in with an actual constructive comment, because it’s all well and good to say that our games inspire us to write many of our books, but our games don’t come out of nowhere, either.
Erica: True. Go on…
Aron: For me, and most of the time for Erica as well, it starts with the antagonist. Someone gets born in our mind who wants to do some terrible shit. Exploring that character, discovering why they want to ruin everything, is a lot of fun. My games have had everything from young godlings trying to carve out a name in the universe like a teen self-discovery crisis, good men who fought for freedom or love but who went too far to pursue them, a man trying to alleviate the suffering of the slums by slaughtering the poor, and all kinds of other shit. Once I know what drives the antagonist, and what they’re driven to do, it’s easy to start coming up with the things my players will need to do to stop them. A game is born. And if it goes well, and if we create some memorable moments, then maybe a book will be born too.
The entire Reforged Trilogy was assembled from bits and bobs of a game we played. But as I mentioned above, while that’s where I got my start, it’s no longer where all of my story ideas come from.
The concept for Whisperworld came from a dream I had long, long ago. The memory of the huge black sphere in the center of my dreamscape that whispered to me all through the night stuck with me so strongly and for so long that I had to write a book about it. A lot of my story ideas are tickles from dreams that I develop into a larger narrative.
A lot of other concepts come from questions, usually asked of Aron over dinner. What if Lily Quinn’s human side had to face off with her succubus half? What if we crossed epic fantasy and Lovecraftian horror? (Which we’re going to do. We have notes and everything. Just not the time… yet.)
Sometimes, like in Aron’s games, the concept is a character. The rest of the story is built up around them. In the House of Five Dragons isn’t a pure example of this, but a hybrid. I had an idea for a modern setting in which a police force – named VEIL – used pens full of refrigerated blood to make pacts with beings in the next world, the Alterra. But then I had an idea for Rikard Mazrem, a war hero who returns to a world he no longer recognizes and which has corrupted the ideals for which he gave his life. The other elements that I was toying with fell right into place once I had Rikard at the center of them all.
The Lily Quinn series is another book series that jumped almost fully-formed from the character concept without inspiration from a game: a half-succubus monster hunter who gets her superpowers from sex. Aron and I had been considering an erotic book or series for a long time, but it wasn’t until we came up with the character of Lily that we could actually do it.
Aron: Nothing comes out of nowhere, of course. To write an erotic series, we needed a character that had a really good excuse to have a lot of sex. A half-succubus character was practically the first idea we had to fit the requirement and it worked perfectly. We added the bounty hunter job, because it gave her something to do with her powers and it took off. Logan Coldhand began with the idea of a man who lost his heart and had it replaced, and was consumed with the idea that he could no longer feel. But those thoughts didn’t just come to us out of the blue while we were pumping gas or shopping. We spend a lot of time just fantasizing about cool shit. Spaceships and dragons and stuff. We try to make up a kind of magic or an alien race and then fast-forward it through evolution to see what kind of worlds it creates and what kind of people belong there. Basically I spend a lot of time daydreaming, especially when I’m at work. The stuff that sticks with us, becomes the grist for our books.
Ideas can come from absolutely anywhere. These are not by any means the only way to generate story ideas, but it’s how I get most of mine.
I hear/read about other authors worrying after each book that this is it! What if this is their *last* story? What if they have no more ideas? That sounds like a terrifying thing to worry about… But I have to admit that I’ve never once had that thought. In the time it takes us to write one book, we’ve usually had ideas for two more. When old age, cancer or an out-of-control bus full of exploding orphans finally takes Aron and me out, I can pretty much guarantee that we’ll still be whining about how many more books we wanted to write.
Well, on that note, that’s the end of the “Concepts” post! Next time, I’ll drone on endlessly about how we turn those little concepts into an outline.
